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Cloverfield

We saw Cloverfield last night. Don't believe bad reviews – I saw several, and I can summarize by saying that they didn't like the film because they didn't get it. One of the more clueful review I read: Marc Savlov's in the Austin Chronicle. Marc knows about this stuff:

Cloverfield is the most intense and original creature feature I've seen in my adult moviegoing life, and that's coming from a guy who knows his Gojira from his Gamera and his Harryhausen from his Honda. Cloverfield isn't a horror film – it's a pure-blood, grade A, exultantly exhilarating monster movie in the grand tradition of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and, to a lesser extent, Merian C. Cooper's King Kong. What makes Cloverfield so memorable and such a genuinely riveting filmgoing experience has less to do with the creature itself, whatever it is, and everything to do with Reeves' direction and a whip-smart, stylistically invisible screenplay that dispenses entirely with any and all genre rules and, brilliantly, views the catastrophic, literally earthshaking events through the lens of one character's digital video camera, complete with rough, nerve-jangling, in-camera edits and an "official" Department of Defense Eyes Only time stamp.

My own thoughts about why the film's great:

It's a giant monster film told from a different perspective, that of the people on the ground, running.
It's brilliant about using the constrained perspective of a single handheld camera to tell the story.
The filmmakers showed real intelligence in realizing their monster.
So much of the story is inferred, not explicit.

Some reviewers thought it was insensitive or bad taste to create a film showing catastrophic destruction in New York so soon after 9/11. They miss the point: this is a film inspired by Gojira (aka Godzilla), which was created nine years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and represented Japanese anxiety about the bomb... the film was cathartic and cautionary. Cloverfield reminds us that we're vulnerable, fragile; and it reminds that love is powerful motivation, and might be the best and last thing we can hope for.

jon posted this at 2:25 PM
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Comments

Thanks for the info about Godzilla and Nagasaki. I didn't know what to feel about seeing the Trump Towers leaning against each other, the iconic imagery of papers fluttering from offices or the site of people fleeing across the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn't think it was insensitive. If you are doing cinema verite of a city's destruction and know exactly what that looks like, it's hard to the be influenced by it in your filmmaking. I do know a few New Yorkers who won't be seeing it. It's still too soon for them and some parts of the movie are too accurate for them to stand right now.

Posted by: Cat Laine | January 19, 2008 10:35 PM